


She's Wordy and Verbose

by Lexie



Category: Bones
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-09
Updated: 2008-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexie/pseuds/Lexie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sweets, Daisy Wick, and a series of vignettes detailing what happened after that phone call in "Man in the Outhouse." Daisy<i> has</i> to be an actual human being somewhere under it all ... right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Can't Refute 'Cause She's So Cute

**Author's Note:**

> I started this just after Daisy's second appearance because I'm convinced that she's less horrendous when you take her out of a stressful group setting where she's trying to convince her personal hero of how competent she is. And also because she and Sweets are freaking adorable. Eventually, I'd love to finish a whole string of these vignettes spanning time period of the _Bones_ seasons where they're dating. Titles from MC Chris's otherwise irrelevant "Nrrrd Grrrl," because I couldn't resist.

Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan did the Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan thing. It's not much of a shocker; they've got the thing -- the Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan thing -- where they can basically read each other's minds and shut everybody else out, when they want to.

So it's not a surprise that Dr. Lance Sweets finds himself alone in his office with a half an hour still to go before the scheduled end of the session, and the prospect of a Friday night with no plans looming overhead.

It's slightly more surprising, even to him, that he pulls out his cell phone and thumbs through his contacts until he finds the number that he snagged out of Dr. Saroyan's Rolodex earlier. But hey, he figures, why not?

(The new grad assistant thought he was brilliant.)

(She was pretty cute, too.)

"Hello?"

"Hi," says Sweets, "is this Daisy Wick?"

"Yes, it is!" the voice on the other end chirps. It's -- pretty unmistakable.

Sweets smiles, wide and easy and maybe hopeful. "Hey! This is Lance."

"…Who?"

He deflates, a little. "Uh, the shrink?"

"_Oh_! From the Jeffersonian!"

His smile is smaller, this time; more rueful. "Yeah. Listen -- sorry you got fired."

"Me too. But -- I'll survive," she says, weakly brave, and Sweets doesn't believe that tone for a second, but he'll let it pass. Daisy's voice perks up again. "What are you doing right now?"

"Nothing; what are you doing?"

"I'm -- wait." Her voice stops dead, then picks up again, suspicious. "You don't play the accordion, do you?"

"The accordion? No; no, no." Sweets is almost laughing a little, grinning, as he settles back in his seat, but he doesn't laugh outright. "I play a little bass, though."

Daisy's voice brightens. "Really? I play acoustic guitar. Pretty well."

"Cool," Sweets says, and he means it. "Listen--"

"Do you want to get dinner?"

He reflexively sits upright. "--Uh, yeah! I mean, sure!"

"Great!" Briskly: "Do you like Indian?"

"I love Indian," Sweets says, firmly.

"Me too! I think it comes from the semester that I spent in India while I was an undergrad." She momentarily sounds thoughtful, and he thinks he might have lost her, but she gets back on track. "Meet me at Tandoor and Grill on Capitol Hill in 45 minutes?"

"Absolutely," he tells her, and they exchange cell phone numbers and goodbyes, and as Sweets grabs his coat and heads out of his office, he's grinning, and not at all thinking about how weird this is.

* * *

  


"Um," says Sweets, after twenty minutes at the table, "here's the thing. We're gonna have to talk about something _besides_ the Jeffersonian, once in a while."

Daisy shoots him a wide-eyed, genuinely blank look over a forkful of chicken curry. "Why?"

"Because. It's -- pretty hard to determine any kind of compatibility or mutual interest if all we do is talk about how awesome Dr. Brennan is." Hurriedly: "Not that she isn't totally awesome."

Daisy Wick's smile is nice, Sweets notices. The restaurant's low, warm lighting could probably make pretty much anybody look like a supermodel, but she's really cute.

"But, I mean, I do lots of stuff that doesn't involve the Jeffersonian, personally _and_ professionally." He sits back in his chair; gestures at her. "I'm sure you do, too."

"Well," says Daisy, looking like she's seriously giving it thought, and Sweets gives her his very best encouraging face. Slowly: "I'm in the process of getting my PhD in physical anthropology from American University, I graduated -- _summa cum laude_ \-- from Dartmouth with degrees in anthropology and psychology, and I just broke up with my boyfriend, who was an emotionally-stunted, accordion-playing jerk." She looks at him after the matter-of-fact recital; asks, earnestly, "Like that?"

"Like that," says Sweets. "--The accordion? Seriously?" He winces. "Dude. _Wheezy_."

"That's what _I_ said!" Daisy smiles at him across the table, and Sweets grins back. She finally takes the bite of curry that has been chilling out on her fork for a couple of minutes. As she chews: "He thought what I do is completely weird."

"Seriously? He thought forensic anthropology was weird?"

"Well, he thought it was gross," she says, pulling a face. "He'd get mad when I brought case files home."

"But -- it's so _cool_," Sweets says, momentarily uncomprehending (though he _does_ realize that most people are uncomfortable looking at images of dead bodies; that it reminds them all too well of their own mortality), and Daisy stares at him for a second, as if trying to gauge his sincerity.

But she keeps looking over at him, a tiny smile threatening to break loose, as she bends to pick up her over-sized shoulder bag. "You really think so?"

He leans over the table, a little curious about what she's rummaging through her purse for. "This one time, Dr. Saroyan let me touch an eyeball." He sits back; spreads his hands. "It was awesome."

"Was it pretty much a bag of fluid?" she asks, drawing a folder out of her bag. "Eyes liquefy _really_ fast."

"Not really." Sweets considers. "It was kind of--" He makes a gesture with thumb and forefinger, as if squeezing an invisible eyeball. "--spongy."

Most people would probably double-check that the other person means it, when they say they're okay with corpses. However, Daisy Wick, Sweets is already getting, is not 'most people.' She drops the folder on the table between them, splayed open. There are a number of documents inside, typed with carefully (perfectly) printed notes in the margins in purple pen, but on top are several high-resolution photos of a mostly-decomposed corpse with its jaw jacked open wide and skeletal arms flung up.

A tray full of drinks rattles alarmingly as the passing waiter catches sight of the photographs, but Daisy doesn't seem to notice.

"Sick," Sweets says appreciatively, and then he is treated to a demonstration of just how intensely Daisy can beam.

She's working on her dissertation on the burial rites of a Brazilian indigenous group, she tells him, and very quickly, Sweets is sucked into trying to extrapolate meaning from postures and artifacts.

Watching Daisy talk about diastatic versus basilar skull fractures -- her eyes bright and flicking up every couple of seconds to look at him -- Sweets ups the call from 'cute' to 'wicked pretty.'

"Did you know," Daisy says, bubbly, her voice not quite rising enough for it to fully be a question, "some forensic taphonomists have found that all human iris colors change to this gunky brown-black within seventy-two hours of death, and within forty-_eight_ hours if the eyes are kept at room temperature, and not actually in a head."

"No," says Sweets, fascinated, and he spears a piece of chicken with his fork. "I totally did not know that." Beat. "Gunky?"

Every single table around them clears out within twenty minutes.


	2. Don't Get the References You Refer To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy has never seen a certain set of classic movies.

The second date is dinner and the new Apatow-Rogen movie, except they never make it to the theater.

"This guy seriously thought his life was one big heroic cycle or something, you know? I thought he was going to, like, pull out a sword and challenge me to a duel," Sweets says, the candle guttering on the table between them; he's grinning.

"…No," Daisy answers, shooting him the serious, bewildered, thinky frown that Sweets has already decided is kind of adorable. "I _don't_ know."

"What, the heroic cycle? It's a literary trope. The first three _Star Wars_," he taps the table, "they're perfect examples."

"I've never seen _Star Wars_," says Daisy, matter-of-fact now. "My dad said that the movies were 'perfect examples' of the decadence and sin that plague modern society." She shrugs, bubbly as ever; her wine glass is nearly empty, but tips precariously in her hand as she pays no attention to it. "I never got around to seeing them after I moved out."

Off his expression, her eyes widen; she adds, hurriedly trying to save face, "I always meant to, though."

Sweets is staring at her, horrified. "Oh, _dude_. You've never seen--"

 

His hand shoots up. "Check, please."

* * *

  
At 1:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are locked in epic battle deep within the innards of Cloud City. The captions are on, to ensure understanding despite the constant stream of running commentary from Daisy, who is watching, rapt, tucked under Sweets's arm (which he only dared to put around her after the Death Star exploded in _A New Hope_), on Sweets's couch.

"The lightsaber is a _really_ phallic weapon," Daisy says, as the two beams of light crackle and buzz on-screen. Her feet are up on the coffee table beside his.

"Oh, totally," Sweets agrees. "There's this parody movie by Mel Brooks where," and he's laughing a little, "they call the lightsaber equivalents 'schwartzes,' and they make all kinds of--"

Luke howls as Darth Vader cuts off his hand, and Daisy nearly upends the bowl of popcorn with her jump. Sweets grabs it to save the last couple of kernels. "Wow," Daisy says, staring at the TV with huge eyes. "I really wasn't expecting that."

Sweets grins. "Just wait til you see what's next."

Daisy shoots him a curious look then watches single-mindedly, blindly reaching into the bowl on Sweets's lap for the last couple bites of popcorn. Sweets is grateful for her excellent sense of spatial awareness.

Luke crawls along the narrow beam, getting as far away as possible from Darth Vader, clinging to a stabilizer. Vader stands at the edge of the platform; he says, "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

"He told me enough," Luke snarls, and Daisy is rapt. "He told me _you_ killed him."

"No," Sweets and James Earl Jones intone together. "_I_ am your father." One of them is grinning significantly more than the other.

Daisy's eyes narrow, disbelieving. "_No_," she says, several seconds before an anguished Luke grits the same word. Daisy looks up at Sweets. "He must be lying!"

Sweets shrugs, grinning, in a clear 'well, you'll just have to wait and see, won't you?' sort of motion, and points at the television. Daisy pulls a small face at him -- still looking perturbed by the news -- and bumps his shoulder with hers, but she's watching.

"If it's true, it makes the whole phallic lightsaber thing way creepier," she says.

"Wicked Oedipal," Sweets agrees. "Except gayer."

"If he was a girl, there could be some really literal penis envy going on." Daisy pauses to reconsider. "Well, maybe not literally. A lightsaber isn't _actually_ a penis." Frowning with thought: "I don't know how you'd make penis envy literal."

"...Oh, that's just wrong," says Sweets, thinking about the fact that Darth Vader _does_ have a daughter (and this line of conversation makes the scene with the interrogator 'droid _really weird_), but he's grinning, because:

Daisy knows her Freudian psychoanalysis.

That is so hot.

Onboard the Millennium Falcon, Leia hears Luke calling for her. Daisy frowns once again. "She can use the Force? How many people can use the Force in this movie?" She looks at Sweets. "I thought all the Jedi were dead."

"They are," Sweets assures her. "It's just Luke and his connection to Leia."

"And Darth Vader, and the Emperor, _and_ Yoda," she reminds him, sure of herself and chomping at the bit to correct him.

"Taught you well, I have," Sweets says, grinning, and Daisy -- who loves Yoda and is totally going to tear up when he dies -- beams at him.

"Listened closely, I did." Her Yoda voice is awful. Like, really, _really_ awful, lacking in any kind of self-awareness (and doesn't _that_ describe Daisy to a T), but the way she smiles when she does it more than makes up for that, because her smile is _seriously_ pretty; the kind that makes a person's entire face light up. Sweets's own smile tempers; he leans in -- and an oblivious Daisy turns back to the television with such a sharp motion that he almost gets whacked in the face by her ponytail. "Did they rescue him?"

Sweets stares at the side of her head for a second, and then he, too, looks at where Lando Calrissian is hauling Luke into the Falcon. "Yep," he says. "Told you Lando wasn't a bad guy."

She nods, firmly. "He betrayed his friend for the sake of the greater good."

Sweets can't help it; it's reflex. He drones, "The greater good."

Contrary to the questioning stare he immediately expects, Daisy looks up at him and says, "Shut it!"

Despite his best efforts, Sweets momentarily looks like something of a kicked puppy.

"But I wasn't--" Realization dawns, aided by the fact that she is grinning like she has just said something very clever. He starts to smile. "You've seen _Hot Fuzz_."

"Only about 14 times," she says, with a tiny scoff that's kind of obnoxious and pretty adorable. "My ex-boyfriend thought it wasn't funny."

"So did my ex-girlfriend," says Sweets, a little awed. Beat. Seriously: "Also, your ex-boyfriend was stupid."

"So was your ex-girlfriend," she says, and they're grinning right at each other -- up until Daisy lunges away to peer more closely at the television. "--Is that a mechanical arm? _Cool_."

"…Yep." Sweets leans back, resigned to obliviousness. "Luke's officially a cyborg."

Thoughtful: "I wonder if he gets phantom pain."

"He does. He must. I mean, amputees get it even while wearing prosthetics. That thing's just a super advanced futuristic prosthetic."

"Have you ever--" The shot zooms out on Luke and Leia standing with the two droids. Daisy stops. She watches the television closely for several seconds; Sweets thinks he can almost _see_ her thinking. Finally, she says, "I feel like they really want me to want Han and Leia to get together, but come on, Luke is way better."

"Really?" asks Sweets, a little cautious. " 'Cause most women, they prefer Han."

Daisy shakes her head, her ponytail bouncing. "Too swaggery, too full of himself, and way, _way_ too alpha male. No, Luke would _definitely_ be the better boyfriend." She says it with the same authoritative nod that she seems to pair with all of her declarative statements.

Sweets grins, boyish and pleased. "I totally agree." Lowering his voice conspiratorially: "You want to know who my favorite is?"

She leans in. "Who?"

"R2-D2."

Daisy flashes one of those sunshine smiles. "I _love_ him!"

The familiar theme song starts blasting over the credits; Sweets glances at the TV, then back at Daisy, very pointedly not looking at the clock in between. "Do you, uh. Want to watch the next one?"

Daisy's eyes hold steady on his. "Not … _right_ now," she says, and there's enough flirtation in the tilt of her head and the set of her lips that Sweets is starting to grin like an idiot even before she leans in and kisses him for the first time.


End file.
